Triage – an app that lives up to its hype

There are two possible explanations when the best thing of your week turned out to be the discovery of an email productivity app.

One is that it was a very bad week – and last week wouldn’t be collecting an award for the most stellar seven days of my life, not the worst – but definitely sitting middling to poor.

But the other explanation is that I actually discovered an app that lives up to its hype  – and that is no small thing.

It’s called Triage and it’s from Wellington innovation house Southgate Labs. It is awesome. Period.

Triage by Southgate Labs

Triage is so simple. Once you sign in with your Gmail, Yahoo, ICloud or any other IMAP email account it gives you a screen with your emails represented as cards with just enough information to be able to see what the email is about. The ones you want to keep you swipe up the ones you don’t want you swipe down. You can click on an email to read the full thing. And that’s it.

It’s not about engaging with the individual emails (although you can write brief replies if you want to) – it’s about organising your inbox so you are left with only the important emails. The aim is that you can then can go into your inbox later and suddenly it’s all sorted and relevant. The app is only available for IOS at the moment but judging by the international blogging and media attention it’s getting I would imagine Southgate Labs would be building on its success on other platforms.

Southgate Labs founder Rowan Simpson has written an engaging blog about the genesis of the idea – which is well worth a read for an insight into our innovation is born. The final spark came from his colleague Michael Koziarski (Koz) who asked:

“Imagine if there was an app that let me use a spare 5 minutes here and there to quickly filter out all of the emails which I can just read and delete, so that when I get back to my desk I only have to deal with the messages which require a bit more thought and attention”.

“Wouldn’t it be better if the inbox on your phone was just the new messages which have arrived since the last time you checked.”

“What I really need is something which forces me to do something with each message one at a time, rather than presenting an overwhelming list of unread messages, that I just end up scrolling back and forth through without ever really dealing to at all.”

Triage does that. It’s so simple it’s genius. Apply First Aid to you inbox now – get it here.